Goosebumps, gasps of horror, sobs and tears. That's what operagoers will experience at the East Coast premiere of Séance on a Wet Afternoon presented by New York City Opera. It is an eerie, emotional roller coaster of a show that grips you with the force of demon possession and doesn’t let go. In fact, it captures your rapt attention with such totality, it scarcely allows the audience to breathe until the final curtain descends.
Séance on a Wet Afternoon is a two-act contemporary opera with music and libretto by American composer Stephen Schwartz, whose original productions such as Godspell, Pippin, and Wicked are considered blockbusters within the annals of musical theater. ‘Séance’ is based on the novel of the same name by Mark McShane and the subsequent film version written and directed by Bryan Forbes, and is the first full-length opera Stephen Schwartz has written.
The story centers around Myra, a middle-aged psychic who is better than her reputation and wants more than anything, she sings, to be “bonafide.” However, Myra’s gifts are authentic, allowing her to be in direct contact with her dead son Arthur, age 11. It’s just that the wider world doesn’t know how gifted she really is. So, Arthur conceives of a plan for Myra to get the recognition for her supernatural talents she so craves, which involves kidnapping an innocent little girl. While Myra and her devoted husband Billy hold the girl captive, Myra will step in as a hero whose psychic abilities will lead authorities directly to the abducted girl. If that sounds like a plan destined to fail, it most certainly will fail, but that’s all that should be said about it. Unlike many well-known classic operas, the story of Séance is not widely known. It would dampen some of the thrills and chills the opera provides to say anything more specific about its plot points.
It can be said that Séance is a story of loss and of the emotional and psychological damage that the heartbreak of losing a child can wreak in an marriage. Myra’s loss of her son Arthur is too much for her to endure. So she begins forfeiting her sanity to embrace an altered reality where she believes death offers a much better and happier existence than the one she is living. She knows this because Arthur tells her death is a bright, happy state-of-being. The stakes couldn’t be higher when Myra and husband Billy embark on a plan to make Myra the next psychic celebrity. Since the opera opens with Myra conducting a séance, the show is riveting from Myra’s first quavering ghostly “ooooooh’s.”
The storyline itself is winning—suspenseful, surprising, titillating—and it’s clear from the first number that Schwartz has written an opera to serve the story and not the other way around. Each musical number deftly advances either the plot or lays out the psychological and emotional struggles each of the main characters faces. It’s a tremendous challenge to distill a full-length work of fiction into an opera of even moderate length—this one ran two-and-a-half hours. One of the most efficient contrivances is Schwartz’s use of a Greek chorus of paparazzi to encapsulate plot highlights and quickly advance the storyline while also providing a commentary on how American media stereotypically respond to human tragedies in the headlines. Schwartz doesn’t have to show us the scene of how Billy kidnaps the girl because the chorus recaps it for us. Yes, the chorus provides all these functions as well as entertainment and shards of comic relief in some powerful, well-written numbers.
And make no mistake. As someone intimately familiar with Schwartz’s musicals, I can say with confidence Séance is a bonafide opera, not an operatic-style musical. In the program notes, Schwartz recounts how his process for writing this work was completely different from that of writing a musical. Different process yielded a vastly different product. Yet, for a contemporary opera with tragic themes, it was not dissonant. Built around motifs, it was infused with musicality and paid significant attention to melody at certain times. This includes Billy’s second-act aria “You Didn’t Know Her,” which was lush and melodic, and oh-so powerful considering its sentimentality was juxtaposed against the realization of the unconscionable crime his wife Myra has just committed.